The Root of all Evil : The God Delusion by Calhoun

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Atheism was the official doctrine of the Soviet Union.

I was under the impression it was anti-theist, which isn't entirely the same thing?

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He nearly destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church and he is responsible for the largest Jewish purge since Hitler. And he was no better to Moslems. How is that not killing in the name of atheism?

So it must be Atheist because he killed theists? You may have a point, but I thought the reason he went after the churches was for much the same reason Henry the 8th did.

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.

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Friday, May 25, 2007 11:01 AM

CHRISMOORHEAD

Forgive me if I'm incorrectly perceiving the situation, but has this seriously degraded into a point system? Crusades are -5 for Christians, Tokugawa -3 for Buddhists, Stalin -4 for Atheists...

I can recognize that some people are just trying to defend their point of view by bringing up someone equally as bad from the other side, but to anyone saying that one side is any worse than another, you're just plain wrong. The point was hit within the first couple of replies on this thread, PEOPLE are the problem. I've seen war on two separate continents now, and the killing over drugs, money and power is just as bad as the killing over religion. Anyone who says otherwise is probably someone who hasn't personally experienced both (or probably either) side of it, as I'm guessing most college professors who spatter around this type of BS fall in to that category.

I'm sorry, this might be slightly off topic, but why do we allow people who've never personally experienced war or genocide to teach about it? I am disgusted by some of the things that colleges, these centers of education and "higher learning", are teaching people when the teachers are just as ignorant as the students.

[IMG]

Place my body on a ship and burn it on the sea,
Let my spirit rise, Valkyries carry me.
Take me to Valhalla where my brothers wait for me.
Fires burn into the sky, my spirit will never die.

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Friday, May 25, 2007 11:02 AM

SERYN

Quote:
Originally posted by Causal:
See? And this is why I don't like RWE discussions. My point with Hitler: religion wasn't the cause of the Holocaust. That's all. I just plain disagree with you, that's all.

call me uniformed, but He was killing JEWS. JEWISH PEOPLE. Followers of THE JEWISH RELIGION.

How is that not religiously motivated? Regardles of his own religion (and the way i understand it it was a mishmash of any stray bits of theory that could be bent to his purpose - i.e religious teachings, scientific practices and even wafts of the occult, which i suppose is another religion)

But anyway, not having read the book, just going on what has been described here, it seems that for an Oxford man his views are remarkably closed, intolerent and simplistic.

No one seems to realise that humans are the root of all evil and religion (and i'm referring here to the organised doctrines, not personal faith) is nothing more than a costruct designed to control (other people, the masses, whatever) and promote an agenda. Its politics,in one way.

Where it get dangerous is most people buy into the religion and turn off their own capacity for thought, others warp and stretch it even further to make it justify what they want to do (i.e terrorists and fundamentalists) and others use it as a get out clause ('its not my fault! the devil made me do it!' 'this insurance does not cover you for Acts of God - basically anything we decide we don't want to pay for') but the same thing can be said of any idea, secular or otherwise.

So this guy seems to have got onto an interesting path and just stopped when it suited him - which is just darned lazy if you ask me.

But i agree that religion shouldn't be taught in schools, or rather, it should be taught, but only as an option - if you get what i mean. It along with scientific theories and even history should be presented as 'this is what some people think'. Which isa thank fully what happened in my school, but i still strongly object to my neice having to sing hymns in assembly, and say morning prayer - it has no place in her life until she's learned enough to make up her own mind.

Actually what worries me more is this craze - ney, hysteria over 'healthy eating'. Its another example of being dictated to and disengaging brain before acting. They have banned, wholesale, certain types of food, giving way to a 'blackmarket' of junk food and more worryingly, an out of school surge in consumption, they ram the concept down the childrens throats day in day out - i'd liken it to brainwashing and they deamonise habits and sensitize the children to the 'wrong' and 'bad' i wouldn't be at all surprised if the victimisation of fat kids had increased exponentially - which is just creating a larger group of f***ed up adults needing therapy and drugs for depressive illnesses - and in all this, not a single thing has been done to highlight the dangers of stigmatising eating habits - anorexia, bullemia, which are all on the increas.

don't beleive me? my neice - a child of healthy habits, balanced eating and perfect growth patterns - has taken to reading the backs of packets, asking about calory content, fat, salt, sugar, she will hold up everything on her plate and ask if it is 'healthy'.

She's barely six years old.

Now if that isn't catching them while they're young i don't know what is - yet virtually the whole country has bought into this belief, and to argue against the rough shod handling is socially unacceptable.

Interesting parallels.

Ok, enough of my illiterate and ill educated rambling.

Isn't sanity really a one trick pony, anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking! But when you're good and crazy...ooh hoo hoo hoo... the skys the limit!
http://www.myspace.com/seryndippyt

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Friday, May 25, 2007 11:08 AM

JEDIJAYNE

Man, I wake up to go and grab a bite to eat and I find y'all are still here goin' at it?

Hope you are havin' fun...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"This is why we lost, you know. Superior numbers." "Thanks for the re-enactment, sir."

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Friday, May 25, 2007 11:14 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Here's a couple things I found when I Googled "Stalin atheist"

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/hitlerstalin.html
http://www.atheistalliance.org/library/nelson-atheism_communism.php

Despite the valid arguments made on both those sites I'm willing to admit that atheism played a small part in Stalin's purges, but the vast majority of the dead were killed for purely political reasons.
Okay. Since both those sites are blatantly biased against religion, maybe one of these days you’ll consider the other side of the discussion.

I find this interesting, on one of the old evolution threads someone said that since the wiki entry on evolution was apparently written by someone who accepted evolution that it wasn't valid. A bias does not prevent someone from making a factual argument, and have you considered the possible bias of your sources? Much of the anti-communist rhetoric espoused (especially during the 50's) specifically targeted their lack of religion as a reason to resist them.

Also, the fact that atheism is defended by atheists shouldn't come as any surprise, most theists would be perfectly happy to let atheism be portrayed as the impetus behind mass murder regardless of truth simply to advance their agenda.

I would also ask you to notice that I did not dismiss your argument, given the link you gave I'm ready to accept that atheism played a small part in the purges. However, given that there was also perfectly plausible non-theistic reasons to kill the theists, combined with the fact that most of the people were killed over policy disagreements and not anything to do with religion I'm simply not prepared to say "Stalin's purges were caused by atheism" because there isn't nearly enough evidence to back that up.

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History actually sees the doctrine of atheism as professed by Marxism/Leninism as playing a very large, albeit sporadic, roll in Stalin’s purges.

Was this history written by people who were biased against atheism?

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What Stalin did in the name of atheism was as politically driven as what bin Laden does in the name of Islam.

Stipulating for a moment that Stalin was largely motivated by Atheism, I'll agree to this. However one of the things I'd like to point out is that the people who carried out Stalin's purges weren't drawn to him because of Atheism, they were drawn to him because of the promises that the Communists made about the utopian society that would be brought about by Communism, Atheism was most likely a tertiary point for most of them, something they were willing to accept in order to reap the benefits of Communism. Bin Laden on the other hand plays directly to peoples religion, he is motivated by the foreign policy decisions of the U.S. but to gain popular support he makes it a Islam vs. the Zionist conspiracy issue. The people did not flock to Stalin because of Atheism, but a large part of the reason why they flock to (and are willing to die for) Bin Laden is because he makes it a religious issue.

Quote:
When a government that espouses a policy of a particular theistic philosophy kills or oppresses any people who don’t support that philosophy many secularists insist that it is result of the theistic belief, but when a government that espouses a policy of a particular atheistic philosophy kills or oppresses any people who don’t support that philosophy those same secularists then insist that it can’t be the cause of this atheistic belief.

Atheists overstate the effect of religion on violence, I'll buy that, but at the theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence and understate the effects of religion on violence. How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?

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Friday, May 25, 2007 11:16 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by ChrisMoorhead:
Place my body on a ship and burn it on the sea,
Let my spirit rise, Valkyries carry me.
Take me to Valhalla where my brothers wait for me.
Fires burn into the sky, my spirit will never die.

I realize this probably isn't the response you wanted for your post, but Manowar is awesome.

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Friday, May 25, 2007 11:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by seryn:
call me uniformed, but - He was killing JEWS. JEWISH PEOPLE. Followers of THE JEWISH RELIGION.

How is that not religiously motivated?

Good question. Yep, Hitler killed Jews. Jewish people. Followers of the Jewish religion. But lest we forget, the Holocaust also targetted Gypsies, Poles and other Slavs, political dissidents, people with mental or physical disabilities, homosexuals, and others deemed unfit for society.

The basic confusion is this: 1) Hitler killed Jews. 2) Judaism is a religion. 3) Therefore, the reason Hitler killed the Jews was because of religion. But saying Hitler killed Jews "because of religion" is ambiguous. Whose religion? Did he kill them because of their religion? Or because of his? Let's take these by turn.

Did Hitler Kill the Jews Because of Their Religion?

Short answer: no. Hitler didn't have a beef with Judaism as such. That is, he wasn't mad because of some feature or features of the Jewish religion. Hitler hated Jews not because of their religion but because he considered them a danger to Germany.

Hitler thought that Germans were descendents of the Aryan race, a race of "supermen" who legitimately had the duty to exert their rule. The identity of Germany as an Aryan nation was threatened by the Jews. As Hitler saw it (and remember that Fascism is a form of hypernationalism), the Jews were a nation unto themselves, but a nation with no homeland. So the Jews brought a second nation into whatever country they lived in. For Hitler, the Jews weren't truly Germans. They didn't belong. As a nation unto themselves, the thinking went, the Jews represented a threat to the German nation because they had no loyalty to the fatherland, but only to themselves. So the Jews (the thinking goes) would worm their way into businesses and take over solely for the good of themselves, not the German nation. It's critical to note that the Nazis thought the Jews were a threat to the German nation not because of the their religion, but because they were a separate nation unto themselves.

In addition, Nazi scientists, using eugenic theories, classified Jews as subhuman. That really let the hate flow, because if the German/Aryan nation was a nation of supermen, and the Jews were subhuman, then there was a danger of polluting German blood through intermarriage. (Note that I don't buy any of this--I think it's as nutty as the next guy.) Incidentally, the "homeless nation" thing is why they persecuted the gypsies. And the subhuman thing is why the persecuted the slavs. And the interbreeding thing is why they persecuted the mentally and physically handicapped. The Holocaust wasn't a project intended to wipe out Jews, but intended to eliminate threats to the "Aryan" nation.

Did Hitler Kill the Jews Because of His Religion?

Again, short answer: no. There is anecdotal evidence that Hitler deployed religious terminology in his propaganda (as previously noted by other posters). But I think that the concensus of historians is that Hitler's religion was not the determining factor in the Holocaust. That is, Hitler saw his project not as a religious project of eliminating another religion, but as a nationalistic project to protect Germany. In the aftermath of the first World War, Germans couldn't understand why they'd lost. After all, no battles had been fought on German soil. No German territory had been taken. And German forces hadn't been decisively defeated. How could the invincible German war machine have lost? The answer, according to some, was that the Jews had conspired to bring Germany down. After all, they had no loyalty to the country. The Jews must have benefitted from it somehow. (Again, I don't buy any of this; it's just what the anti-Semites thought.) And then in the aftermath of the war, Germany's economy went to hell. Inflation and unemployment were completely out of control. And the Treaty of Versailles was humiliating (among other things, Germany had to take total responsibility for the war). So Hitler (and others) fixated on the Jews as the source of all these problems. It wasn't as if Hitler was a good Christian boy who got into power and took advantage of the fact to let his religion drive him to genocide. Rather, his mishmash of bad history, cock-eyed mythology and pseudo-scientific theories drove him to it.

That is what I mean when I say that religion wasn't the cause of the Holocaust.

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Friday, May 25, 2007 11:39 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
[BAtheists overstate the effect of religion on violence, I'll buy that, but at the theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence and understate the effects of religion on violence. How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?

Now we're getting somewhere! I see your side ("theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence") and I think you're seeing some of mine ("atheists overstate the effect of religion on violence").

Incidentally, I think bin Ladin makes a good case study. How many of us really think that his primary motivation is religious? If we do, do we think that he really understands his own faith? If we don't, what might his real motivations be?

________________________________________________________________________

- Grand High Poobah of the Mythical Land of Iowa, and Keeper of State Secrets
- Captain, FFF.net Grammar Police

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Friday, May 25, 2007 11:52 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
I find this interesting, on one of the old evolution threads someone said that since the wiki entry on evolution was apparently written by someone who accepted evolution that it wasn't valid. A bias does not prevent someone from making a factual argument, and have you considered the possible bias of your sources? Much of the anti-communist rhetoric espoused (especially during the 50's) specifically targeted their lack of religion as a reason to resist them.

I’ve not really provided any sources. The Wikipedia source I posted was as per your specific response. Wikipedia is not always reliable. It’s a good place to start an investigation of a topic, but not the best place to end it. And yes, I’m a little bit dismissive of what the atheistalliance has to say on the topic. I would consider them to be even less reliable then the Wikipedia site. But I am happy that you’re willing to accept the roll that atheism has played in Communism. I’m not trying to be dismissive of your argument, but as far as bias in this thread, I don’t see many people trying to argue that atheism is the cause of the world’s violence. What I see are people trying to argue the theism is the cause of world’s violence while they attempt to insulate atheism, and as I’ve already point out that is not an internally consistent argument.

Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Was this history written by people who were biased against atheism?

I don’t know but given the degree of contempt the academic community seems to have for religion, I’d doubt it.

Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Stipulating for a moment that Stalin was largely motivated by Atheism, I'll agree to this. However one of the things I'd like to point out is that the people who carried out Stalin's purges weren't drawn to him because of Atheism, they were drawn to him because of the promises that the Communists made about the utopian society that would be brought about by Communism, Atheism was most likely a tertiary point for most of them, something they were willing to accept in order to reap the benefits of Communism. Bin Laden on the other hand plays directly to peoples religion, he is motivated by the foreign policy decisions of the U.S. but to gain popular support he makes it a Islam vs. the Zionist conspiracy issue. The people did not flock to Stalin because of Atheism, but a large part of the reason why they flock to (and are willing to die for) Bin Laden is because he makes it a religious issue.

I doubt this too. It is not Islam that makes a man strap a bomb to his chest and kill innocent women and children. It is something else, and I don’t think it is religion that bin Laden inspires in people. He’s not even a religious leader.

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Friday, May 25, 2007 11:57 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
I was under the impression it was anti-theist, which isn't entirely the same thing?

I guess that depends on how you look at it, but as far as I’m concerned it is the same thing. I don’t know how many people in Stalinist Russia didn’t believe in the existence of any god or just hated everyone who did, but what I do know is that it was the particular way that belief was applied that was the problem, not the belief itself. Was it the same kind of atheism that a normal healthy fair-minded person espouses? Probably not. But then if we are going to draw a distinction between atheism and anti-theism with regards to Stalinism, then we should make the same provision for the theistic side, which we don’t do. We label both the religion espoused by the bin Laden’s of the world the same way we label the religion espoused by normal healthy fair-minded people, but they are not the same thing. Instead of trying to insulate atheism or some brand of theism because we sympathize with it, we should either just admit that any philosophy, including atheism, can and has been used by someone as an excuse to kill in the process of grabbing or consolidating power, or perhaps a better way of looking at it, is to realize that regardless of what beliefs are espoused, these kinds of things are always political in nature, not religious (either atheistically religious or theistically religious).

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
So it must be Atheist because he killed theists? You may have a point, but I thought the reason he went after the churches was for much the same reason Henry the 8th did.

Marxism and Leninism espoused the belief that atheism was the supreme belief and the Soviet government, except when it had other more pressing issues (like the Nazi Blitz rolling over the Ukraine), consistently advocated the targeting of non-atheist entities and the suppression and elimination of theistic beliefs. Now that they didn’t manage to accomplish all of that or that sometimes other things were more important, doesn’t mean that’s not what they were trying to do. Henry the 8th’s reasons for doing what he did were far less ideological, I think. And Stalin’s particular views were probably a lot more like Hitler’s in that all he really wanted was ultimate power; the ideology was just a means to that end.

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Friday, May 25, 2007 12:12 PM

LEADB

Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?

Plenty.
I've also heard plenty of folks say that Christianity is a religion of peace. And several others have remarked that so is their religion. And many atheists and agnostics claim to be people of peace.

I'm not clear on your point; are you trying to definitely state that Islam is -not- a religion of peace? If so, are you will to grant that neither is Chrisitanity?

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Friday, May 25, 2007 12:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Causal:
Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
[BAtheists overstate the effect of religion on violence, I'll buy that, but at the theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence and understate the effects of religion on violence. How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?

Now we're getting somewhere! I see your side ("theists overstate the effect of atheism on violence") and I think you're seeing some of mine ("atheists overstate the effect of religion on violence").

IMO the potential for abuse and violence from religion is much higher then for atheism. Many of the things that atheists (and theists of other religions) blame theists for (Inquisition, Crusades, jihads etc.) are not entirely the fault of theism, however some of the fault lies with theism if not for starting them but for allowing them to happen as religion can convince people to adopt positions that are entirely irrational.

However the potential for abuse exists in atheism when it is dogmatic, the same as any other dogma. The difference is that atheism is usually much less dogmatic then theism, it's harder to justify something based on a lack of belief then based off of a belief, particularly when the belief has usually been firmly entrenched since childhood while the unbelief usually stems from later examination of a topic.

Quote:
Incidentally, I think bin Ladin makes a good case study. How many of us really think that his primary motivation is religious?

A slightly better question would be was it his ORIGINAL primary motivation, the answer to that is known to be no, his original problem was with the U.S. putting soldiers in Saudi Arabia and then exacerbated by not taking them away after Desert Storm was over. As for his motivations now I can't say, I'm pretty sure that his secondary motivation was religious and that may have taken the place of his primary motivation (though I dont think that's the case).

Quote:
If we do, do we think that he really understands his own faith?

Sure, some Muslims will tell you that Islam is a religion of peace, the same as most Christians, however both the Koran and the Bible are full of justifications for murder, oppression, war, hate, and intolerance, it's all a matter of which parts you put the emphasis on, Bin laden would use the parts of the Koran glorifying war to justify it and he would be right.

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Friday, May 25, 2007 12:19 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by leadb:
Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
How many Muslims have you heard say that Islam is a religion of peace?

Plenty.
I've also heard plenty of folks say that Christianity is a religion of peace. And several others have remarked that so is their religion. And many atheists and agnostics claim to be people of peace.

I'm not clear on your point; are you trying to definitely state that Islam is -not- a religion of peace? If so, are you will to grant that neither is Chrisitanity?

You're asking the wrong person, I'm an atheist. My point was that some Muslims say that there's is a religion of peace while others are perfectly happy to use Islam as justification for murder and rightfully so given some of the passages I've seen from the Koran. Christianity is much the same with some parts espousing peace love and understanding while others demand the death of certain groups of people. Like I said i my last post, it's all a matter of where you put the emphasis.

EDIT: And that I suppose is one of my major problems, religion can easily be used to justify murder, with atheism it isn't so easy since there's no holy book decrying non-believers

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Friday, May 25, 2007 2:39 PM

TELCOD

I think I read/heard that 10% of Americans believe Elvis is still alive. I have found no shortage of delusion nor stupidity on this planet. Been lied to all my life. What makes you think, people have been telling you the truth. How dependent is that? Give up your personal power, cause you don't want to deal.

Talk to god, "You are great, I am nothing, now can I have a hotdog?"

Who's the picked on christian up there. Suck it up, martyr. As far as I am concerned, all religion is poison for the weak and feeble. But you can share the planet with me. Seems like that is more generousity than most religious pikers show us non believers.

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Friday, May 25, 2007 5:26 PM

LEADB

Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
You're asking the wrong person, I'm an atheist. My point was that some Muslims say that there's is a religion of peace while others are perfectly happy to use Islam as justification for murder and rightfully so given some of the passages I've seen from the Koran. Christianity is much the same with some parts espousing peace love and understanding while others demand the death of certain groups of people. Like I said i my last post, it's all a matter of where you put the emphasis.

Had I been clear that was your initial intent, I would not have commented. Thanks for clarifying.

Quote:

EDIT: And that I suppose is one of my major problems, religion can easily be used to justify murder, with atheism it isn't so easy since there's no holy book decrying non-believers

Or it can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance; which gets back to my original post... The violence is about the pursuit of power.

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Friday, May 25, 2007 6:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by leadb:
Had I been clear that was your initial intent, I would not have commented. Thanks for clarifying.

Apologies for not being clear.

Quote:
Or it can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance

So can Secular Humanism, even pure science can give us a reason to be nice to each other*, religion isn't necessary to get people to play nice.

Quote:
which gets back to my original post... The violence is about the pursuit of power.

Sometimes certainly, I'll even agree with most times, but sometimes violence is just about anger and hate (I suppose you can turn that around and call it power but it's not the most accurate description IMO) and religion gives one more thing that people feel VERY strongly about to be angry and hateful over and can be used to promote anger and hate in other areas (persecution of homosexuals and "witches" for instance).

*Humans are not physically exceptional in any particular way thus our success as a species is not due to physical prowess, the only things we have going for us over other animals are intelligence and teamwork, thus from an evolutionary standpoint it makes sense for us to leverage intelligence and teamwork to ensure the survival of our species since that's what brought us success before. This would mean that it is in our best interests to strive for intelligence and work together and treat each other fairly since fair treatment reinforces teamwork.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 12:22 AM

What I don't get is why the discussion focusses on religion being the root of all evil, when it's clear that if there were a God, he'd be the root of all evil, since he created everything in the first place.

Which leads to the question: why do people insist on worshipping the root of all evil?

Just a thought.

Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 12:37 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Josef Stalin had millions of people killed because they were not perceived to believe or support Stalin’s brand of atheist communism. How is that any different then bin Laden having people killed for not supporting his brand of Islam? If we are going to use this kind of language then we should endeavor to apply it fairly. Stalin had millions killed in an effort to export his brand of atheist communism. If bin Laden murdered in the name of theism, then Stalin murdered in the name of atheism.
Yes and in an Atheist family the parents would let their children stay out all night having sex and taking drugs.

If Stalin's purges were Atheist, then Iraq is a Christian Crusade, after all George Bush is a Christain, and God did tell him to do it.

Actually, all though I don't think Iraq is a Christian Crusade, such a position would be much stronger than saying Stalin was killing for Atheism.

You trying to portray Stalin's purges as an Atheistic version of the obviously theistic terrorism of Al Qaeda is little more than word play, it's intellectually dishonest, frankly.

Religion is square centre in Bin Landen's thinking, belief in the non-existence of god wasn't even a side issue to the purges. The fact that you construct a sentence in such away as to shoe horn Atheism in, then throw away the communism aspect in order to put Atheism front, and centre changes that, not at all.

Gotta side with Cit here man. That's some extrodinary word play. You're almost convincing that any battle, whether religiously motivated, or motivated by the absolute non-existance and disbelief of religion are all religious battles. No wonder you Dawkinites are doing such a bang up job destroying religion in the West. We need to get a bunch of you in Iraq and the rest of the middle east pronto so we can get them to put down the Queran and pick up the remote and popcorn and their cell phones and text their choices in for the next winner of Afganian Idol......

I know I'll sleep better at night knowing that they'd be less likely to suicide bomb the mall tomorrow just because their pick didn't win Idol than because their God told them to.

"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 1:40 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
I guess that depends on how you look at it, but as far as I’m concerned it is the same thing. I don’t know how many people in Stalinist Russia didn’t believe in the existence of any god or just hated everyone who did, but what I do know is that it was the particular way that belief was applied that was the problem, not the belief itself.

I don't accept that Atheism is a type of Theism. "Stalin was Atheist" is not an equivalent statement to "Al Qaeda is a religion based organisation". If Stalin was a Christian would that mean the purges were Christian? I don't think so, I don't see how the beliefs of the head man automatically make his actions based entirely on those beliefs.

Believe it or not, but my basis for saying something is motivated by religion is not based on solely on the beliefs of the people running the show. If someone says "Lets kill people because God says so" I'd say that was religiously motivated, but saying "Let's go kill people" does not therefore mean that it is Atheist, simply because there is no Theistic element. If, however, the statement was "Let's kill people because there is no God" the situation would be different.

Quote:
But then if we are going to draw a distinction between atheism and anti-theism with regards to Stalinism, then we should make the same provision for the theistic side, which we don’t do.

I already make a distinction between Theism and anti-Atheism. But that's not the distinction you are asking for, I don't think the distinction you are asking for is equivalent. You seem to be saying that Fundamentalism is to Theism, what Anti-Theism is to Atheism, and I don't see that at all.

Quote:
We label both the religion espoused by the bin Laden’s of the world the same way we label the religion espoused by normal healthy fair-minded people, but they are not the same thing.

I don't think we do Finn, at least most people don't. Though I have, at times, been one of the few people on this site who doesn't want to say "all Muslims are Terrorists". But necessarily a given fundamentalism is a subset of a given Theism, but I don't accept that Anti-Theism is a subset of Atheism.

Quote:
Henry the 8th’s reasons for doing what he did were far less ideological, I think. And Stalin’s particular views were probably a lot more like Hitler’s in that all he really wanted was ultimate power; the ideology was just a means to that end.

I thought that's what Henry VIII wanted? He got rid of the old Catholicism and replaced it with a brand of Christianity that had him at the Head, under God.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 1:48 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
If, however, the statement was "Let's kill people because there is no God" the situation would be different.

What if it's "Let's kill people because they believe in God". That would be a theistic motivation, wouldn't it?

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 1:55 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
What if it's "Let's kill people because they believe in God". That would be a theistic motivation, wouldn't it?

I think that's more difficult. It is motivated by the victims religion, but you can't say they're religion is at fault, any more than you can say a Theist killing an Atheist is automatically a killing motivated by Atheism. It would be not unlike saying the Woman who got raped brought it on herself by wearing a short skirt.

It is anti-theists, either a specific theism, or all theisms, but it is not necessarily Atheist, which is one reason why I think you can't say Anti-Theism is to Atheism what Fundamentalism is to Theism.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 3:12 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
What I don't get is why the discussion focusses on religion being the root of all evil, when it's clear that if there were a God, he'd be the root of all evil, since he created everything in the first place.

Which leads to the question: why do people insist on worshipping the root of all evil?

This, of course, takes us in a completely different direction than the rest of the thread. This is the argument against God from evil, or the so-called "Problem of Evil." In a nutshell, there are two versions of it: the logical problem and the evidentiary problem. The logical problem holds that it is not just mistaken but positively irrational to believe in God, because the attributes commonly predicated of him are such that they are incompatible with the existence of evil in the world. The logical problem, though at one time it had quite a following, is not argued with much frequency any more, due to the efforts of Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga's works God and Other Minds and The Nature of Necessity (and summarized in God, Freedom, and Evil) set forth a solution to the logical problem of evil that is accepted by most philosopers (theistic and atheistic alike) as having solved the problem. Hence most philosophers do not take this strategy in arguing against God. (By the by, I wrote a paper on the Plantinga's free will defense; it's on my blog: http://calebkeller.blogspot.com/2007/05/plantinga-and-problem-of-evil.
html).

Typically, your objection is answered as follows: if humans have freedom of will, then they and they alone are responsible for their choices. And if that's the case, you can have humans doing evil things that God isn't the cause of.

Interested to hear what you think.

Oh, and a P.S. to those who think that all thinking about God is illogical thinking: I'd challenge you to pick up a copy of God, Freedom and Evil and see what it looks like for someone to use logic to think about God.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:05 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Causal:
This is the argument against God from evil, or the so-called "Problem of Evil." In a nutshell, there are two versions of it: the logical problem and the evidentiary problem. The logical problem holds that it is not just mistaken but positively irrational to believe in God, because the attributes commonly predicated of him are such that they are incompatible with the existence of evil in the world.

My point was a bit different from the standard "problem of evil" argument, though. I wasn't really saying it's irrational to believe in God because there's evil in the world, I was saying it's irrational to worship him because there's evil in the world. For argument's sake, let's assume God exists. He created evil in the world (or rather, a person's capacity to do evil), so does the good he created really make up for it? People worship him because of the good he's done and ignore the evil he enables and allows, which is sort of like thinking a mafia boss or a warlord is a saint since he gives money to charity or tells his henchmen to help build an orphanage.

Quote:
If humans have freedom of will, then they and they alone are responsible for their choices. And if that's the case, you can have humans doing evil things that God isn't the cause of.

I agree with that statement in itself, but it's part of the contradiction that I mentioned above: Evil is attributed to people and, presumably, good attributed to God. It seems like very selective reasoning, it's like he can't lose and people can keep worshipping him because they attribute him with only good intentions, but the argument forgets that God allows freedom of will to include doing evil things. If God had the option of allowing evil by giving people unlimited free will, or suppressing evil by allowing only limited free will that doesn't allow for actions that are evil, why would he not go for the latter? Is unlimited free will, which in most cases is restricted by upbringing and society anyway, really more important to him than the lack of evil?

I haven't had a look at your paper yet since I'm still pressed for time (exams...), but I look forward to reading it.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:19 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Gotta side with Cit here man. That's some extrodinary word play. You're almost convincing that any battle, whether religiously motivated, or motivated by the absolute non-existance and disbelief of religion are all religious battles. No wonder you Dawkinites are doing such a bang up job destroying religion in the West.

Are you actually accusing me of being a “Dawkinite?” It seems like you’ve bought hook line and sinker into Citizen’s word play.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:23 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
Quote:
Or it can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance

So can Secular Humanism, even pure science can give us a reason to be nice to each other*, religion isn't necessary to get people to play nice.

I do think that you're right that there are forces other than religion that can be used as a source of motivation or inspiration for peaceful co-existence. But that doesn't mean that it's wrong to say that religion can't or shouldn't (and I realize you're not arguing that, but some might). I think that it's the case that if you look at the most egregious abuses of Christianity, you'll find that they occur in the period after Theodosius established Christianity as the official (and only legal) religion of the Roman Empire. Prior to that period, Christians had been a persecuted minority--obviously not in any position to perpetrate large-scale abuses of the type we've been discussing this far. Galen, the Roman physician, took up the subject of the Christian faith (which was steadily moving throughout the empire) in the middle of the second century. Although he criticized the Christians for not being able to present a philosophical defense of their beliefs, "Galen was impressed that Christians were able to lead men and women to a life of virtue in the same fashion as the leading philosophical schools of the day. Through Christian practice, Christian morality, the early Chrstian movement made its first bid for acceptance within the Greco-Roman world." [ 1 ] Wilken asserts that in the world of second century Rome, Christians, while they were reviled for going against the grain of traditional Roman religion, were also living decent lives, and it was the quality of those lives that legitimized the Christian religion to their contemporaries.

By the time of the "Great Persecution" in 303 CE, Ralph Martin Novak notes that, "The tetrarchs found it difficult to enforce wide-spread compliance with the measures directed against the Christians because many local officials only half-heartedly carried out their instructions. This lack of zeal among the local officials may lie in the facy that by this time the Christians were a known quantity: people who, even if they were prone to a rather embarrassingly strident monotheism, were nonetheless respectable in their personal and ethical conduct and performed many works of charity." [ 2 ] Novak, then, thinks that the reason the Great Persecution wasn't more devastating to the Christian church was that while the Christians did certainly have strange beliefs, they were also benefitting their communities.

Contrast this to the situation after Constantine's legalization of Christianity: "Constantine appears to have believed that Christianity could be made to serve as a source of unity and strength for Rome's empire." [ 3 ] He embarked on this project enthusiastically, even exerting his control over church councils in order to enforce his "one church, one empire, one emperor" doctrine. By the time of Theodosius, Christianity had been incorporated fully into the apparatus of the Roman Empire and vice versa, such that teasing them apart would have been impossible. And this interweaving of the Church and the structures of State power persisted for another thousand-plus years. It was during that time that the "religious" violence took place. To be fair, a thing like the Spanish Inquisition ("Fear, surprise, and a fanatical devotion to the Pope!!") does certainly seem to be fully and wholly religiously motivated. But if we were to look at other instances of "religious" violence, I suspect that we'd see that in many cases, such violence was a bid for power couched in religious terms, more so than it was legitimately religious violence.

I guess my main thesis here is that while, yes, there have been and continue to be instances of purely religious violence, much of the violence carried out in religion's name is not religiously motivated, but rather motivated by a desire for power. I mourn the fact that my faith was tied into the apparatus of power for so long, because now people like Dawkins (and even some on this board) take religion to be responsible for all the world's ills; I submit that it is us, humanity, who is responsible for the world's ills, and that were it not for our continual and insatiable lust for power, a great many of those ills would not exist.

[ 1 ] The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, pg 92, Robert Louis Wilken, Yale University Press, 1984.
[ 2 ] Christianity and the Roman Empire, pg 142, Ralph Martin Novak, Trinity Press International, 2001.
[ 3 ] Ibid.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
I don't accept that Atheism is a type of Theism. "Stalin was Atheist" is not an equivalent statement to "Al Qaeda is a religion based organisation". If Stalin was a Christian would that mean the purges were Christian? I don't think so, I don't see how the beliefs of the head man automatically make his actions based entirely on those beliefs.

First of all Stalin and Al Qaeda are not equivalent because one is an organization and one is man. But the atheism in Stalin’s purges, among other religious purges in the Soviet Union, had to do with the ideology of the Soviet Union, not with Stalin’s atheism.

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
If, however, the statement was "Let's kill people because there is no God" the situation would be different.

“Let’s kill people because they believe in god.”

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
I don't think we do Finn, at least most people don't. Though I have, at times, been one of the few people on this site who doesn't want to say "all Muslims are Terrorists". But necessarily a given fundamentalism is a subset of a given Theism, but I don't accept that Anti-Theism is a subset of Atheism.

You’re arguing my point. In other words, you're not willing to make the same provisions for the theistic side that you are for the atheistic side. Your claim requires that the religious justification used by Al Qaeda is just a subset of the religious opinions held by the majority of peace-loving religious people, but then the brand of atheism espoused by the Soviet Union in its religious purges was something different from peace-loving atheist. And until we are willing to apply this language fairly, I don’t think it should be used, because it is not internal consistent and it will just become a justification to hate religion in general.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:40 AM

MALACHITE

Hey Fredgiblet:
At the risk of being to tangential, I appreciated your comment and wanted to respond.

Anyways, it sounds like you are using the Miller experiment to justify the possibility of a naturalistic origin of life. However, the Miller experiment does not even apply to the question. Why? Because 1) It presupposes an early atmosphere of methane, hydrogen and ammonia. The current understanding is that the early environment was mainly water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen which do not interact to form the building blocks of life. Therefore, the Miller experiment makes no contribution to a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life -- it doesn't even apply.

The second flaw in using the Miller experiment as justification is that it was built with a "trap", to separate out more complicated molecules. Nature, however, does not have a trap to deliberately separate the more complicated molecules. In real life, even presupposing that the early atmosphere they used was correct, these molecules would have interacted with anything else in the "soup", generally forming long chain hydrocarbons -- not amino acids and nucleotides.

One more side note: as far as I know, the Miller experiment never demonstrated that it even formed the 4 basic nucleotides of DNA and all 20 essential amino acids. And the amino acids it did form were a mixture of right and left handed versions (modern organisms only use left handed versions in the construction of proteins). It gets even more complicated, but I think you get the idea that producing and organizing these building blocks into something life-promoting defied the odds...

As far as your point about needing some kind of precursor cell that is simpler than any of the one-celled organisms we have today, the problem is, the simplest organism we can conceive of that meets criteria for being alive (um, I guess that would mean having the ability to replicate, repair itself, move, grow, eat, and excrete) is still incredibly complex and still beyond anything we can create in a lab. I think it takes some degree of faith to believe that this could have formed naturally.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:50 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
First of all Stalin and Al Qaeda are not equivalent because one is an organization and one is man. But the atheism in Stalin’s purges, among other religious purges in the Soviet Union, had to do with the ideology of the Soviet Union, not with the Stalin’s atheism.

I assume you are missing the point on purpose.

Quote:
"people because they believe in god.”

I've already addressed that.

Quote:
You’re arguing my point. In other words, you're not willing to make the same provisions for the theistic side that you are for the atheistic side.

You saying it doesn't make it true. You seem unwilling to accept that Atheism isn't a form of Theism.

Quote:
You claim that the religious justification used by Al Qaeda is just a subset of the religious opinions held by the majority of peace-loving religious people, but then you claim that the brand of atheism espoused by the Soviet Union in its religious purges was something different from peace-loving atheist.

Someone can be anti-Theist without being Atheist, but you can't be a religious fundamentalist without being a Theists, therefore it is entirely incorrect to say Anti-Theism is to Atheist what fundamentalism is too theism. Saying “No it isn't” because you are unwilling to make the same provisions for the Atheist side that you do for the Theistic side, is not an argument

Quote:
And until we are willing to apply this language fairly, I don’t think it should be used, because it is not internal consistent and it will just become a justification to hate religion in general.

Saying that a Fundamentalist Muslim Fanatic has to be a Muslim isn't internally consistent? You're going to have to explain that one.

Quote:
Are you actually accusing me of being a “Dawkinite?” It seems like you’ve bought hook line and sinker into Citizen’s word play.

It is not I who is using 'word play', it is you. Secondly it's obvious Jack wasn't talking to you, he's trying to insult, and straw man the arguments of, everyone on the side of the debate he doesn't agree with, and he agrees with your side.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:56 AM

MALACHITE

Hey Citizen,
My point in mentioning that some people here tend to focus on religion as being evil/negative was to say that much good has been done in the name of religion, yet they don't take that into account.

Also, I was a bit surprised to see that in the span of a few keystrokes, you were able to weigh all the good ever done throughout time by religiously motivated groups versus all the good ever done by non-religiously motivated groups and deduce that they "canceled out". Wow, I knew firefly fans were intelligent, but this borders on omniscience...

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:00 AM

I said I suspect they cancel out. The fact that you think we should weigh ONLY the good done by religion borders on dishonest argument, the rest borders on insult.

Why do you think it's important to weigh the good done by Theists but not Atheists?

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:02 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
I assume you are missing the point on purpose.

Of course you do.

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
I've already addressed that.

It looks to me like you dodged it.

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
You saying it doesn't make it true. You seem unwilling to accept that Atheism isn't a form of Theism.

It doesn’t make any difference whether I accept that or not, people killed in the Soviet Union’s religious purges are as dead as those killed by Al Qaeda.

The communist ideology of the Soviet Union was atheist. But you want to re-define that as something else in order to insulate atheism from the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. That would be fine, except that you are not willing to make the same provision for Al Qaeda, and until you do, this use of religion as the root of violence is not internally consistent. You’re use of language automatically implies that religious beliefs are inherently violent, but the a lack of religious belief is not, when in fact Communism and Fascism demonstrate conclusive that the lack of religion and even atheism can be used as tools to justify murder.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:08 AM

LEADB

Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:

Quote:
Or it can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance

So can Secular Humanism, even pure science can give us a reason to be nice to each other*, religion isn't necessary to get people to play nice.

Quote:
which gets back to my original post... The violence is about the pursuit of power.

Sometimes certainly, I'll even agree with most times, but sometimes violence is just about anger and hate (I suppose you can turn that around and call it power but it's not the most accurate description IMO) and religion gives one more thing that people feel VERY strongly about to be angry and hateful over and can be used to promote anger and hate in other areas (persecution of homosexuals and "witches" for instance).

So, your logic follows, that since people feel VERY strongly about religion, ipso facto religion is ~~inaccurate~~ 'bad' and thus should be stomped out? (I'm sure the stomping in your case would be limited strictly to non-violent, caring methods.) [ edit to remove 'inaccurate' and substitute 'bad' ]

An equivalent argument for the "other side" would be to find some avowed 'human secularist', point out any faults, and declare it devoid of truth, and a thing to be stomped out.

So, to be very clear, I will state:
Secular Humanism can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance.

We agree on that point. However, arguing that religion is the root of all evil (remember the original premise of this discussion) does -not- lead to peaceful co-existance; it tends to lead to hate, war, death and destruction. My position is better stated as such:

Belief in God (god, goddess, gods, etc), and hence religion of some variety, is not intrinsicly evil; it is often a force for good. Thus, religion is -not- the root of -all- evil.

To further stipulate, I will maintain that some people lack the intellectual capacity to be a "good human secularist"; if you 'liberate' them from the 'controls' of religion, you can end up with a Stalin. Of course, Stalin was not a proponent of 'Human Secularism' (to the best of my knowledge); we was a communist and an atheist. And, clearly in agreement with my original post, a 'power grabber', and used what structures were available to him to gain the power he wished. Is this "-1" for the atheist team? I think not. No more than I would blame Christians in general for the many misdeeds of George W. But Stalin is proof positive we should not go clammering off following the lead of an athiest blindly (which I will acknowledge a 'Human secularist' would tend not to given the 'test beliefs' convictions they uphold).

So remember, 'test beliefs', very important. I may not quite qualify for 'human secularist', but I'm a big one for 'test beliefs'. I'm also fond of 'check your assumptions.'

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:22 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Of course you do.

It's a more polite way of saying, "you dodged it".

Quote:
It looks to me like you dodged it.

Actually, no I didn't, evidently you didn't like the answer.

Quote:
It doesn’t make any difference whether I accept that or not, people killed in the Soviet Union’s religious purges are as dead as those killed by Al Qaeda.

And the people who are dead in Iraq are still dead, what difference does that make?

Quote:
The communist ideology of the Soviet Union was atheist. But you want to re-define that as something else in order to insulate atheism from the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union.

I've been very clear on my reasoning, you in turn, accuse me of this and that, and make replies that amount to "Yes it is" and "Because I say so". If your position is so much stronger, and more internally consistent than my own, I'm at a loss to explain why you are unable to make your case without personal attacks.

Quote:
That would be fine, except that you are not willing to make the same provision for Al Qaeda, and until you do, this use of religion as the root of violence is not internally consistent.

If your position was as undeniable as you seem to think you would not need these Straw man arguments.

Quote:
You’re use of language automatically implies that religious beliefs are inherently violent, but the a lack of religious belief is not, when in fact Communism and Fascism demonstrate conclusive that the lack of religion and even atheism can be used as tools to justify murder.

If you say so, but you're use of language implies that Atheism is solely responsible for all violence, and Religion is sometimes blamed.

You cannot be a, for sake of argument, Muslim fanatic, without being a Muslim. You're position is apparently, that you can, that is not consistent, internally or otherwise. Your position is further that you can't be anti-theist without being Atheist, which is not the case. For a start one could be anti-Theism and be Agnostic. You have continued to fail to make your case, because frankly I don't see personal attacks, and “yes it is” as a valid substitute for reasoning.

I'm ready to listen as soon as you are ready to speak.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:27 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
I'm ready to listen as soon as you are ready to speak.

This much I know is not true.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 5:30 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
This much I know is not true.

I have asked for your reasoning, and in responce you insult me. It's clear you aren't interested in anyone elses opinion, you are interested in shouting at people until they agree with you.

I rather suspect that you don't even know what my position is.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 6:10 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
My point was a bit different from the standard "problem of evil" argument, though. I wasn't really saying it's irrational to believe in God because there's evil in the world, I was saying it's irrational to worship him because there's evil in the world. For argument's sake, let's assume God exists. He created evil in the world (or rather, a person's capacity to do evil), so does the good he created really make up for it? People worship him because of the good he's done and ignore the evil he enables and allows, which is sort of like thinking a mafia boss or a warlord is a saint since he gives money to charity or tells his henchmen to help build an orphanage.

When you put it like that, it seems very irrational, but I’m not quite sure that is what is intended. The idea that God created evil (as well as good) is seen much more rationally, when it is understood as God creating free will. Most Western liberal democracies exalt the ideas of “free speech,” “right to privacy,” and “personal freedoms.” But by doing so, are we also exalting the evils that are practiced because of these freedoms? So is it then irrational to support liberal democracies? There are those who believe that the good provided by these freedoms does not outweigh the evil that men practice with them. I’m not one of them; I tend to view these freedoms as a good thing.

The alternative is that god created man to be a slave to him, and there are those who believe that is precisely why god created man. That actually seems fairly irrational to me. But this is actually an attitude that we tend to associate with evil, not good. The enslavement of man has never been views as preferable, even by those who’ve practiced slavery.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 6:25 AM

But I'm not talking about social liberties, I'm talking about freedom of will. One values social liberties because one knows there is such a thing as, for example, freedom of speech and one would like to have it because it'd probably improve one's quality of life in some way. However, having a limited freedom of will would be different because we wouldn't know that it is limited in the first place. We wouldn't be able to think "Hey, I wonder why rape never crossed my mind before" because a limited freedom of will wouldn't allow us to consider rape. If God were to limit our freedom of will to not consider evil thoughts, we wouldn't know we were lacking any sort of freedom and we wouldn't have evil thoughts.

And if evil is the price to pay for unlimited freedom of will (which, as I said, in most cases gets constrained by upbringing and society anyway), is it worth it?

Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 6:39 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
If God were to limit our freedom of will to not consider evil thoughts, we wouldn't know we were lacking any sort of freedom and we wouldn't have evil thoughts.

I guess for the most part he did do that. Maybe it just occurred to him that having one species on the planet who could think more broadly about the world seemed like a good thing at the time. God could have created humans as simpletons, much as most animals, I suppose. The life of ignorant bliss my cat leads does sometimes seem preferable, but as a scientist, I can’t say that I would truly prefer the inability to grasp the beauty and wonder of the universe. Do we not praise our ability to be free-thinkers? I don’t really understand how this comes back to God. God granted us the ability to be free-thinkers; that sounds like a gift to me. How we chose to use it is now up to us, not God.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 6:54 AM

Curtailing freedom of will by eliminating evil is hardly like making humans simpletons, and it wouldn't limit our capacity to be free-thinkers except when it comes to evil thoughts. You'd still have most of the things you cherish.

"Maybe it just occurred to him that having one species on the planet who could think more broadly about the world seemed like a good thing at the time."
By hypothesis, God is omniscient and he should've seen bad things were going to happen, and it's not like evil is something modern, it was part of society from the dawn of civilisation.

"God granted us the ability to be free-thinkers; that sounds like a gift to me."
Too much of a good thing can spoil it, though.

Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 6:56 AM

AGENTROUKA

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
The alternative is that god created man to be a slave to him, and there are those who believe that is precisely why god created man. That actually seems fairly irrational to me. But this is actually an attitude that we tend to associate with evil, not good. The enslavement of man has never been views as preferable, even by those who’ve practiced slavery.

But isn't that still the case, humans being a slave to God's will?

After all, we have "free will" but if we actually exercise it and choose to do evil, we go to hell.

That sort of "You're free to do what you want, but if you don't do as I say, you'll be punished" attitude seems more like a mockery of free will.

That's not to say I'm endorsing evil. Just saying, it's creating free will with the condition of not really exercising it by threat of punishment. How is that not slavery?

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 6:57 AM

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Originally posted by leadb:
So, your logic follows, that since people feel VERY strongly about religion, ipso facto religion is ~~inaccurate~~ 'bad' and thus should be stomped out? (I'm sure the stomping in your case would be limited strictly to non-violent, caring methods.) [ edit to remove 'inaccurate' and substitute 'bad' ]

No. My logic is that the good that comes from religion can come from other sources that do not have to potential (or at least have reduced potential) for abuse. I did not state that religion itself is bad, merely that it (like many other things) can have evil effects. If you can achieve the same (or better) results with something that has less negative side-effects why shouldn't you? I would not shed a tear at the death of religion, but I would not advocate a systematic purge of religion either. I do believe that organized religion should be "stomped out" since the potential for abuse is very high and the benefit of organized religion over personal religion is small. However, religion itself is not something I feel strongly about either way (except when I see another story about an abortion clinic being bombed or the Phelps clan picketing another funeral).

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So, to be very clear, I will state:
Secular Humanism can be easily used to justify peaceful co-existance.

We agree on that point. However, arguing that religion is the root of all evil (remember the original premise of this discussion) does -not- lead to peaceful co-existance; it tends to lead to hate, war, death and destruction. My position is better stated as such:

Belief in God (god, goddess, gods, etc), and hence religion of some variety, is not intrinsicly evil; it is often a force for good. Thus, religion is -not- the root of -all- evil.

Agreed, I don't believe I ever said I agreed with Dawkins, in fact I may have posted (and I know I considered posting) a response saying that I think he does more harm then good (at least lately, he used to be pretty kick-ass but then he got religious about his atheism). My position, more clearly stated, is that religion is not necessary and is more harmful and less beneficial then some of the alternatives. However, I am all for allowing people to harm themselves, I just don't want it to affect me.

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To further stipulate, I will maintain that some people lack the intellectual capacity to be a "good human secularist"; if you 'liberate' them from the 'controls' of religion, you can end up with a Stalin.

Agreed...to a much lesser point. Psychopaths exist, this cannot be denied, but religion doesn't necessarily make them any better and in some cases religion can have a hand in creating them (Ed Gein anyone?).

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But Stalin is proof positive we should not go clammering off following the lead of an athiest blindly (which I will acknowledge a 'Human secularist' would tend not to given the 'test beliefs' convictions they uphold).

Right, but that's just it, there is no power structure in atheism, there are no prophets there is no reason to follow someone because they are atheist. People didn't follow Stalin because he was an atheist, they followed him because he promised them things they wanted. On the other hand many religions stress obedience to the leaders of the religion giving over control of their lives to someone else.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 7:10 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
Curtailing freedom of will by eliminating evil is hardly like making humans simpletons, and it wouldn't limit our capacity to be free-thinkers except when it comes to evil thoughts. You'd still have most of the things you cherish.

No, we’d have to become even more then just simpletons. Even animals kill each other. In order to accomplish what you are suggesting it seems to me that humans would have to be devolved down to some sort of inert amoeba. I don’t think that it makes much sense to say that we would be free thinkers if we were told what we could and couldn’t think.

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Originally posted by Khyron:
By hypothesis, God is omniscient and he should've seen bad things were going to happen, and it's not like evil is something modern, it was part of society from the dawn of civilisation.

I don’t know how omniscient god is. Certainly more then me probably, but in any event, the choice of evil was left up to us. If we choose to be evil, I can’t see that as God’s fault.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 7:15 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
That's not to say I'm endorsing evil. Just saying, it's creating free will with the condition of not really exercising it by threat of punishment. How is that not slavery?

It sounds to me that you’re complaining about Newton’s Third Law. The ability to be sentient and free thinking is not the same thing as the ability to operate without consequences.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 7:32 AM

AGENTROUKA

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
That's not to say I'm endorsing evil. Just saying, it's creating free will with the condition of not really exercising it by threat of punishment. How is that not slavery?
It sounds to me that you’re complaining about Newton’s Third Law. The ability to be sentient and free thinking is not the same thing as the ability to operate without consequences.

But it's God who made the consequences.

What is the point of free will if the only option that doesn't draw bad consequences is obeying God's will in the first place?

It seems like mindgames at best.

All over the Old Testament God gets pissed off when people don't worship him and don't obey his laws. He killed all but a handful in the story of the great flood for that exact reason.

He created people, apparently, just to worship him. Slaves, whether they theoretically have a choice or not, because in the end they all get judged and only the "good" ones don't go to hell. Hell is a pretty damn big God-made consequence.

And even if you count that people lived in paradise and ignorance when they were first created, he still gave them a just mockery of free will. Obey my one rule or be thrown out of paradise to suffer and die. What's the point of that? The temptation to make a choice that's not the Correct One is already sin.

Slaves and toys to a bored, vain deity, that's all I ever took away from that. Which is why Jesus, to me, is a wonderful philosopher with an amazing message but I just can't connect him to an actual God.

God, to me, is not a judging entity or loving father figure, but rather the indifferent order of the universe. Indifference I can deal with, but not the pretense of caring.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 7:34 AM

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Originally posted by Malachite:
Hey Fredgiblet:
Anyways, it sounds like you are using the Miller experiment to justify the possibility of a naturalistic origin of life. However, the Miller experiment does not even apply to the question. Why? Because 1) It presupposes an early atmosphere of methane, hydrogen and ammonia. The current understanding is that the early environment was mainly water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen which do not interact to form the building blocks of life. Therefore, the Miller experiment makes no contribution to a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life -- it doesn't even apply.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment

Everything that I've seen shows that the current understanding is that a reducing atmosphere is likely, if you can show me links to sources that say otherwise I'll consider them. Additionally the entire atmosphere doesn't need to be reducing it could have had a reducing pocket (a cave perhaps) that just reduces the number of experiments being run at any given time.

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The second flaw in using the Miller experiment as justification is that it was built with a "trap", to separate out more complicated molecules.

The main purpose of the experiment was to show that complex organic chemicals could form, to show that they need to able to see the results, they could have done the experiment without the trap but that would have made the experiment more difficult for no reason.

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Nature, however, does not have a trap to deliberately separate the more complicated molecules. In real life, even presupposing that the early atmosphere they used was correct, these molecules would have interacted with anything else in the "soup", generally forming long chain hydrocarbons -- not amino acids and nucleotides.

I'll get back to this at the end.

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One more side note: as far as I know, the Miller experiment never demonstrated that it even formed the 4 basic nucleotides of DNA and all 20 essential amino acids.

The assumption of need for the 4 nucleotides can be stipulated, but the earliest self-replicators would not necessarily have needed all 22 amino acids. Also the Miller experiment was just the first there were others done later including at least one that created all 4 nucleotides.

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And the amino acids it did form were a mixture of right and left handed versions (modern organisms only use left handed versions in the construction of proteins).

So? It isn't written in stone anywhere that we had to have these particular building blocks, it's entirely possible that we could have ended up with a mixture of handedness or exclusively right-handed acids. It is possible that right-handed acids are somehow less fit then left-handed acids and thus that replicators that used left-handed acids outcompeted the right-handers. Also I've heard that this might be evidence for panspermia as the polarization of radiation might have forced a handedness in the acids developed in space.

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It gets even more complicated, but I think you get the idea that producing and organizing these building blocks into something life-promoting defied the odds...

I'll get to this at the end.

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As far as your point about needing some kind of precursor cell that is simpler than any of the one-celled organisms we have today, the problem is, the simplest organism we can conceive of that meets criteria for being alive (um, I guess that would mean having the ability to replicate, repair itself, move, grow, eat, and excrete) is still incredibly complex and still beyond anything we can create in a lab. I think it takes some degree of faith to believe that this could have formed naturally.

The only necessary ability out of the ones you listed is the ability to replicate, the rest are tertiary, though one you didn't list, heritable variation, is necessary for life to have developed after abiogenesis. Once self replication with heritable variation has developed everything else can (will?) develop over time.

Now for the points I skipped. I'll buy that the molecules would tend towards long chain hydrocarbons, and yes it would be complicated and improbable for the molecules to form a replicator, BUT it only has to happen once. There was millions if not billions of simultaneous Miller experiments going on for possibly millions of years, if you have everyone in the world flip coins all day every day for millions of years you will eventually get someone who gets a specific sequence of 1000 results. Given enough time and enough repetitions of the attempt even the most improbable event WILL happen.

As another point, my point was that we have a plausible explanation, NOT that the Miller experiments proved that it happened but rather that they showed that amino acids and DNA bases CAN form naturally without man-made or divine intervention. We haven't proven (and in all likelyhood cannot prove) that abiogenesis IS what happened, all we can prove is what MIGHT have happened.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 7:38 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Khyron:
y point was a bit different from the standard "problem of evil" argument, though. I wasn't really saying it's irrational to believe in God because there's evil in the world, I was saying it's irrational to worship him because there's evil in the world. For argument's sake, let's assume God exists. He created evil in the world (or rather, a person's capacity to do evil), so does the good he created really make up for it? People worship him because of the good he's done and ignore the evil he enables and allows, which is sort of like thinking a mafia boss or a warlord is a saint since he gives money to charity or tells his henchmen to help build an orphanage.

Well, the reason I bring up the logical problem of evil is that "atheologians" (to use Plantinga's term) want to argue these sorts of questions to establish God's non-existence. They boil down to objections of the sort: "But surely God could have done better!" From there, atheist will say that the fact that he could have done different, but didn't means either he's not the three-omnis God (as traditionally conceived) or that he doesn't exist.

I see what you mean by the distinction between it being irrational to believe there is such a being and it being irrational to worship such a being. That said, your argument seems to turn around your assertion that "he created the evil in the world (or, rather a person's capacity to do evil)." In the first place, we're going to have to tease these apart. Which is it? Did he create the evil? Or did he create the human capacity for evil? It could be argued that you can conflate these two (such that to create the capacity is sufficient for having been the cause of the evil. But the typical view of human freedom is such that a person is alone responsible for the decisions they make (when it comes to moral culpability). Being that I accept a more libertarian view of human freedom I have to insist that God's being the cause of freedom on the will is not sufficient for his being the cause of evil.

The next interesting bit of your argument (and at this juncture I'm grateful that we both seem to know the philosophical application of the word "argument") is this: "does the good he created really make up for it?" Well, that's the real trick, eh? There are some philosophers whose entire theodicy is based on the belief that all evil will work out for the best in the end (even if we don't know how). This is a pretty difficult view to attack, because no matter what objection is raised, the answer will always be, "I don't know how, but it will work out for the best in the end." But this is hardly a thoroughgoing philosophical defense. Plantinga's proposal is that it might be possible that God could not have created a world with moral good but no moral evil. Now, because he was defending against the logical problem of evil, all he had to establish is that that is possibly the case--not that it is the case. But consider the nature of moral goods. Suppose Smith happens upon Jones, who's fallen into a lake and can't swim. Smith is in a position to save Jones. If Smith dives into the lake and saves Jones, I take that act to be a moral good. But the reason I think that that was a morally good act is because Smith could have done otherwise. Just as morally evil acts seem to involve free choice, morally good acts also involve free choice. But if Smith had no choice in the matter, if he was forced in some way to do what he did, I would hardly say that what he did was morally good. The upshot is that it might turn out that you can't have any moral good unless moral evil is also a live option.

In addition, I'm a little confused on how we might go about measuring evils and goods and comparing the two. It does seem like there's an awful lot of evil in the world. But there's also a lot of good two. I'm not sure we're going to be able to find an objective way to measure and compare, so there's some element of subjectivity inherent to asking questions about goods outweighing evils, and so forth.

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I agree with that statement in itself, but it's part of the contradiction that I mentioned above: Evil is attributed to people and, presumably, good attributed to God. It seems like very selective reasoning, it's like he can't lose and people can keep worshipping him because they attribute him with only good intentions, but the argument forgets that God allows freedom of will to include doing evil things.

Actually, I'm not sure that good is attributed exclusively to God. Take Mother Theresa, for instance. She certainly seems to have done much good--and I'm not attributing that to God. Logically, there's a difference between the following:

(1) If God did it, then it was good.
(2) If it was good, then God did it.

Proposition (1) says that if you know that God did something, that's all you need to know to know that it was good. This is totally different then (2), though, which says that if it was a good thing, that's all you need to know in order to know that God did that thing. I'm not sure many philosophical theists would accept (2), but I think most have to accept (1). But if (1) is the case, we've solved the "selective reasoning" problem, because we're no longer say he's the only being that does good.

As to the question of God allowing freedom of will that results in evil, it seems to be the case that the only solution here is to take that freedom away. It certainly seems to be the case that there would be no moral evil without free will; but God couldn't create humans if he wanted to create a world with non-free creatures. I take it that freedom of will is essential to the being of humans. If God took that, then whatever we would be, it would not be human. (Of course, the question of whether freedom is essential to the nature of humanity is not beyond disputing. But that's my belief on the matter.)

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If God had the option of allowing evil by giving people unlimited free will, or suppressing evil by allowing only limited free will that doesn't allow for actions that are evil, why would he not go for the latter? Is unlimited free will, which in most cases is restricted by upbringing and society anyway, really more important to him than the lack of evil?

On a libertarian view of freedom, "limited free will" isn't free will at all. I had a professor that argued that God could have made a world in which, given any choice, that choice would have been between two moral goods. This might allow humans to have freedom of the will and still have a world with no moral evil. But how would God accomplish such a thing? For surely if humans are free, eventually one of them will have some sort of impulse (say to lie, or to rape, or to harm someone) that will force a choice between a moral good and a moral evil. So it would seem that God will still have to change something essential to humanity in order to maintain a world with no moral evil.

I hope you do read my essay on Plantinga. His basic assertion is that perhaps it would not have been possible for God to create a world with significantly morally free creatures but no moral evil.

Anyway, sorry for the long post.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 7:38 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
No, we’d have to become even more then just simpletons. Even animals kill each other.

Yes they do, almost always in order to survive or for related reasons. That's not evil. In most cases a person killing somebody for his survival isn't evil either. A murderer, though, doesn't kill for his own survival, and his actions would be evil.

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In order to accomplish what you are suggesting it seems to me that humans would have to be devolved down to some sort of inert amoeba.

No it doesn't, unless you think free-thinking people who don't have evil thoughts are inert amoeba.

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If we choose to be evil, I can’t see that as God’s fault.

No, but he gave us the choice and so he has to share the responsibility. If a parent gives a child a gun to play with and it kills someone, is it the child's fault or the parent's fault?

Before that analogy gets taken out of context, note that I don't think people who do evil things are innocent, as the child would arguably be in such a situation; the analogy was supposed to highlight the aspect of responsibility of the parent-figure, not the innocence or lack thereof of the child-figure.

Causal, I'll get to your post later, an interesting read though (as always).

Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 7:39 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by AgentRouka:
God, to me, is not a judging entity or living father figure, but rather the indifferent order of the universe. Indifference I can deal with, but not the pretense of caring.

That wouldn’t seem to solve your problem though. There are just as many consequences to disobeying the laws of the Universe. We are as much slaves to the laws of the universe as to god.

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Saturday, May 26, 2007 7:45 AM